Overview

This document describes the Google Analytics
Real Time Reporting API. For a detailed reference of the API, read the
API
Reference.

The Real Time Reporting API, in limited beta,
is available for developer preview only.
Sign up
to access the API.

Introduction

The Real Time Reporting API enables you to request real time data—for
example, real time activity on your property—for an authenticated
user.

You can use the Real Time Reporting API to:

Display active viewers of a page and create a sense of
urgency for users looking at an item with finite inventory.

Display the most popular content such as the top 10 active pages.

Create and display a real time dashboard.

Google Analytics superProxy

Use Google Analytics superProxy
to handle many of the implementation details of working with Google Analytics
APIs on authentication, caching, and transforming API responses to formats
used directly with visualization and chart libraries.

Conceptual Overview

The fundamental concepts underlying the Real Time Reporting API are:

How reports relate to users and views (profiles).

The structure of a report and how to build queries.

Working with the API response.

Reports, Users, and Views (Profiles)

Before users are able to use your application to request their report data
from a view (profile), you must:

Querying for Dimensions and Metrics

You query the API for Google Analytics report data, which consists of
dimensions and metrics. Metrics are the individual measurements of user
activity like the number of active users on the property right now.
Dimensions break down metrics across some common criteria such as traffic
sources, geo location, page information, etc.

Working with Reports

The data returned from the API can be thought of as a table with a
header and a list of rows. Each API response consists of a header
that describes the name and data type of each column. The response also
contains a list of rows, where each row is a list of cells with data in
the same order as the headers. Read the
Real Time Reporting API Reference Guide
for more information about the API response.

Quota Policy

The Real Time Reporting API handles millions of data query operations. We
employ a quota system to protect the system from receiving more operations
than it can handle, and to ensure an equitable distribution of system
resources. Read the
Limits and Quota guide for more details.

Caution: If you regularly poll the Real
Time Reporting API at short intervals, you reach the daily quota limits very
quickly. Instead, you should implement server side caching and possibly
increase the refresh interval to manage your quota efficiently. See the
Real Time
Reporting API Developer Guide for additional details.